NEW IN OUR STORE, THE CHRIS WARE BOX, BUILDING STORIES
Douglas Wolk wrote this precise review for the New York Times
and we are happy to quote him
The most despairing image in Chris Ware’s magnificent new graphic novel,
“Building Stories” — and there are plenty of candidates — depicts a
dumpy middle-aged couple, naked in their bedroom. She’s just dropped her
clothes to the floor; he’s lying on the bed, oblivious to her, his face
and chest illuminated by the iPad propped on his belly.
You will never be able to read “Building Stories” on a digital tablet,
by design. It is a physical object, printed on wood pulp, darn it. It’s a
big, sturdy box, containing 14 different “easily misplaced elements” — a
hard-bound volume or two, pamphlets and leaflets of various dimensions,
a monstrously huge tabloid à la century-old Sunday newspaper comics
sections and a folded board of the sort that might once have come with a
fancy game. In which order should one read them? Whatever, Ware shrugs,
uncharacteristically relinquishing his customary absolute control. In
the world of “Building Stories,” linearity leads only to decay and
death.
Arguably, the box’s central nugget of story is a sequence Ware
serialized in The New York Times Magazine in the mid-2000s, which
appears here in something that approximates the dimensions and binding
of a Little Golden Book. The chief protagonist of “Building Stories,” a
sad, lonely florist with a prosthetic leg (Ware never gives her a name),
lives on the third story of a 98-year-old building in Chicago. She’s a
former art student who eventually gave up on creating anything: as she
explains in a pseudo-gag cartoon on the edge of the box (!), she was
“just art curious.”
Below her, on the second floor, there’s a couple whose romance is
utterly dead; the ground floor is occupied by the landlady, an elderly,
faltering spinster. On an autumn day in 2000, the florist deals with a
plumbing problem, briefly loses her cat and has a fumbling makeout
session with a former classmate. An epilogue shows her, five years
later, driving past the building with her baby daughter; on that
section’s back cover, a wrecking ball is smashing off the corner of her
former apartment. That’s what you get for chasing time’s arrow.
